Talk about extending the regular season to an 18th game has picked up recently and one member of the NFL Players Association’s executive committee weighed in on the notion on Wednesday.
Colts center Ryan Kelly said that having more games “sounds great” to some people when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell discusses it, but that his feeling is that it is “too many games” for those who actually play the game. Kelly said that corresponding changes to the preseason would be bad for players trying to establish themselves as well.
“I [wish] people understood how hard it was to play 16, then they [added] another one?” Kelly said, via Stephen Holder of ESPN.com. “And they get rid of preseason games, well, OK, who’s that going to hurt? The guys that don’t have a shot, the guys that are the undrafted guys or late-round [picks] that need to go out there and improve themselves. I think that the fans see it like they don’t watch the preseason games, but they have no idea what goes on inside the building.”
The NFL moved to 17 games after the union narrowly passed the most recent collective bargaining agreement. Any move to 18 games would also need to be bargained and there’s no timeline in place for discussions on that front at the moment.